Posts Tagged ‘Digital Text Platform’
Mobipocket No Longer Accepting New Publishers
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in About Publishing on October 12th, 2009
If you’ve visited the Mobipocket site recently with the intention of setting up a new publisher account, you no doubt encountered this message on the publisher welcome page:
Effective September 2009, we will no longer open new accounts for publishers to sell titles through the Kindle Store or MobiPocket.com. If you have an existing account, there will be no change and you can continue to upload and sell titles using Ebookbase. New publishers with a US address and bank account can sign up to sell ebooks in the Kindle store via our self-service publishing channel at http://dtp.amazon.com.
While I haven’t seen any confirmation, this certainly looks like the first big step in Amazon absorbing Mobipocket into the overall Digital Text Platform (DTP) service, which is the other route – besides Mobipocket – for getting book into the Amazon Kindle store (note: for independent publishers; mainstream publishers have their own distribution channel for Kindle).
So, the upshot is that if you have an existing Mobipocket account, you’re fine for now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some changes in the next year. The big question will be if Amazon will continue to use Mobipocket as a distribution platform for the many independent ebook retailers out there. Stay tuned!
Holdouts for Kindle and Print Book Discounts on Amazon: Mobipocket and Lightning Source
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in About Publishing on August 5th, 2009
We don’t know why Amazon has stopped discounting books published by independent authors and publishers, but it has. If you look in the Kindle Store or the greater Amazon bookstore, you’ll see that those nice red discount prices have disappeared from a great many titles. We can speculate on why, but it’s just that: speculation. The real reasons are only going to be discussed in Amazon board meetings.
The bottom line is that all of us – authors, publishers, and readers – are at the mercy of whatever Amazon decides to do pricing-wise. I’m not saying Amazon is “bad,” as I’m sure they’re trying to do whatever is best for their bottom line. But the bottom line for you and me is that customers are being asked to pay higher prices for books that have often been very inexpensive to start with, and authors and publishers are making less money (and it wasn’t a lot to start with, in most cases).
Right now, the only two avenues to getting discount prices for Kindle and print for self- or small-press publishers and authors that I see are publishing through Mobipocket for distribution to the Kindle Store, and Lightning Source, Inc. (LSI) for print. It looks like Amazon has discontinued its discounts across the board on titles published through its own direct services, including the Digital Text Platform for Kindle, CreateSpace, and BookSurge. Curiously, Mobipocket is owned by Amazon, but titles published through them to the Kindle Store are still being discounted – hopefully that will continue.
The downside is that for Mobipocket-based sales for Kindle, sales are registered through Amazon’s Vendor Central, which is pretty clunky and doesn’t give an ongoing tally of sales – monthly reports only. And LSI is more expensive ($212, I believe, including an ISBN) to set up; but it has wider distribution – including B&N – and the author/publisher has control of the retailer discount.
As a consumer, a lot of that may not mean anything to you, so let me show you the difference in a way your pocketbook will clearly understand. For the Kindle, there are two versions of my novel In Her Name (Omnibus Edition) now available in the Kindle store. The one published through Amazon’s DTP is currently priced at $8.99 – with no discount. The version distributed from Mobipocket is now priced at $7.19, which is 20% off. As a consumer, which are you going to want to buy? And if you had a choice between two different books that had similar appeal and the same list price, but one is discounted 20%, which are you going to get? All things being equal, the cheaper one, of course!
So, the beat goes on. Or beating, whichever you prefer. But these are some things I thought that you should be aware of, whether you’re a consumer or author/publisher.
For Mac Users: Preparing Documents for Amazon’s DTP
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in About Publishing on April 19th, 2009
While Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP), which is Amazon’s interface for self-publishers and small presses to get their books into the Kindle Store, has been gradually improving, one thing that remains a major pain in the you-know-where is uploading documents created on a Mac.
As with many systems, Amazon’s DTP is designed for input from Microsoft Windows applications, and doesn’t like the way Mac apps typically encode text characters: DTP won’t accept documents encoded with Unicode, although it does now seem to take (or at least produce) documents with UTF-8. Without getting into a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo, those encodings map out character sets beyond the Windows-standard Latin-1 (Western) encoding and English/western European character sets (Unicode provides support for a wide range of international characters).
Where Mac users run into problems is that 1) DTP won’t accept the more typical Mac documents natively produced by Pages or TextEdit, and 2) if you’re preparing the print version of your document in Pages, you can’t output directly to HTML (which is a really silly oversight, methinks).
There are other programs, particularly InDesign, that many Mac users use to format their print versions; I can’t help you with those, because I only have Pages and TextEdit, but hopefully what I go over here will help.
So, let’s say that you have your book set up in Pages and it’s ready to go. Here’s what I did that seemed to work:
Step 1: Save it as an RTF file.
Step 2: Open the RTF file in TextEdit.
Step 3: In TextEdit do Save As -> HTML
You can then edit the HTML file as (or if) necessary in an editor like Taco. Once that’s done, take the HTML file and any image files it needs, zip them together – you must use a program that has a “Windows-friendly” zip option (like YemuZip) or DTP won’t accept it! – and then upload it to DTP.
I wish I could say that I could guarantee you that this will work for your document, but with the vagaries of DTP, I can’t. I know this worked for my novel In Her Name: Empire, and as long as you use an English or western European character set you should – I hope – be fine.
However, if you’re using another character set – let’s just take Chinese as one of many examples – it will not work. The Kindle is still very limited in what it can do compared to web applications. It looks like DTP has moved up from accepting only Latin-1 (Western) encoded documents to at least accepting UTF-8 encodings, but you may still run into trouble: if you try to upload your HTML and DTP comes back with a long unintelligible error that has “unicode” buried in it, chances are this is the problem.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any immediate solutions to that: my first recommendation would be for you to go back and make sure your HTML is Latin-1 (Windows) or UTF-8, not Unicode (these are all separate options for encoding, depending on your app).
Amazon’s Digital Text Platform: Where’s Customer Support?
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in About Publishing on February 5th, 2009
Let me be up front about something: I like Amazon. I’ve been an Amazon customer for years, and have done my share to help boost their profits.
But Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (or DTP), which is the mechanism for independent and small press publishers to get their books into the Amazon Kindle Store, has become an example of everything that the rest of Amazon isn’t. The only thing that truly amazes me is that it hasn’t gotten a lot more in the way of bad press and a class action lawsuit.
I’ve been using DTP for nearly a year now, having first published my novel In Her Name there early last year (2008). It was – and still is – beta software, meaning that it is full-featured but isn’t entirely stable, and beta users are generally expected to put up with bugs and help the developers refine the software into a stable, fully operational release.
I have no problem with that part – I’m used to dealing with buggy software (I’ll refrain from any comments on Microsoft Windows!). But what I do have a problem with is the near-total lack of technical support from the DTP staff. There are only two ways of – supposedly – contacting the developers and admins: one is on the DTP forums, the other is by email to dtp-feedback@amazon.com. If the staff routinely visited the forums or actually answered their emails, there wouldn’t be an issue. But they don’t. Read the rest of this entry »
